WATCHING MediaStorm presents Rape of a Nation, Marcus Bleasdale’s photos from the D.R.C. Growing Up Online Is the Internet changing the experience of childhood? Frontline looks at the way kids are spending their time online.. READING Pirates of Sundance: Columbia Law prof Tim Wu recommends indie filmmakers look to BitTorrent for distribution. Via Slate.com Rabbi […]

WATCHING Patti Smith talks about the new film Patti Smith: Dream of Life by Stephen Sebring (via Salon.com). Classic moments from the Sundance Film Festival (via The Sundance Channel). READING Salon.com film critic Andrew O’Heir writes about his favorite narrative and documentary films from Sundance. Michael Moore wants multiplexes to air more documentaries and foreign […]

This is the last of our live reports from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Cynthia Lopez is POV/AmDoc’s Vice President. This festival marked her eighth year attending Sundance. What follows is her personal diary of the high and low points of last week’s Sundance Film Festival. You just never know what’s going to happen when […]

My dancing days are done! I’m back home from Sundance, and well-satiated by a great dose of documentaries. It’s been a pretty remarkable festival for docs. Despite some pre-festival chatter that docs might get a cold reception, the films at Sundance showed a real diversity of subject matter and accomplishments in craft  and ranged […]

POV correspondent Kris Wilton spent the day with cinematographer-turned-documentary-director Ellen Kuras at the Sundance Film Festial on Sunday, January 20. Ellen Kuras is a legendary director of photography who has worked with an impressive array of directors, including Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Michel Gondry on some of the most stunning films of the last […]

I’m writing this post while waiting on line for Morgan Spurlock‘s latest doc, the much anticipated Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? (Sample chatter from other people waiting in the queue: “I love Morgan.” “Me too, but I was still thinking of going to eat at McDonald’s before this.”) Things have been busy […]

Steven Sebrings‘s film Patti Smith: Dream of Life premiered at Sundance on Sunday. Steven is a fashion photographer and he has been working on the film for the past twelve years since meeting Patti on a shoot for Spin magazine. Shot entirely on 16mm (unheard of these days), the film is an impressionistic portrait of […]

We hosted our annual POV brunch on Sunday  a welcome relief from the hectic pace of screenings, parties and general mischief that seems to be the Sundance routine. First to arrive was Steven Sebring and Patti Smith  an artist who changed my life at a formative stage. Steven’s film Patti Smith: Dream of […]

Filmmakers Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath premiered their film, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), earlier today at the Sundance Film Festival. The film chronicles the epic story of a family forced to emigrate from Laos after the chaos of the secret air war waged by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Kuras has spent the last 23 […]

The first screening I attend at Sundance is a real happening. Saturday afternoon’s premiere of American Teen is filmmaker Nanette Burstein‘s return to Sundance after six years. (Burstein had previously produced The Kid Stays in the Picture, about Paramount producer Robert Evans, which was at Sundance in 2002.) For American Teen, Burstein spent a year […]

They should call it the Sundoc Film Festival. I get on my flight to Salt Lake City yesterday, and the guy in the row in front of me is wearing a baseball cap and sweatshirt that both say, “Bigger, Stronger, Faster,” aka the title of Christopher Bell‘s documentary about America’s win-at-all-costs pressures, as told through […]

Hey, so enough talk about 2007, the year that was (or wasn’t, depending on your perspective): The 2008 documentary season really begins this week with the Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off yesterday. With no less than forty documentaries in the fest this year, it’s a documentary-lovers dream. The only danger is to overindulge. I’m […]